But let us examine a still more vehement charge of his against us; it is this: “If one must proceed to say something harsher still, he does not even keep the Divine substance pure and unadulterated from inferior and contradictory elements.” This is the charge, but the proof of it is,—what? Observe the strong professional attack! “If He is imperishable only by reason of the unending in His Life, and ungenerate only by reason of the unbeginning, then wherein He is not imperishable He is perishable, and wherein He is not ungenerate He is generated.” Then returning to the charge, he repeats, “He will then be, as unbeginning, at once ungenerate and perishable, and, as unending, at once imperishable and generated.” Such is his “harsher” statement, which, according to his threat, he has discharged against us, to prove that we say that the Divine substance is mingled with contradictory and even inferior elements. However, I think it is plain to all who keep unimpaired within themselves the power of judging the truth, that our Master has given no handle at all, in what he has said, to this calumniator, but that the latter has garbled it at will, and then, playing at arguing, has drawn out this childish sophistry. But that it may be plainer still to all my readers, I will repeat that statement of the Master word for word, and then confront Eunomius’ words with it. “We call the Universal Deity” (he says) “imperishable and ungenerate, using these words with different applications of thought; for when we concentrate our view upon the ages behind us, we find the life of the Deity transcending every limit, and so name Him ‘ungenerate’; but when we turn our thoughts upon the ages to come, we call the infinite in Him, the boundless, the absence of all end to His living, ‘imperishability.’ As, then, this endlessness is called imperishable, so too this beginninglessness is called ungenerate; and we arrive at these names by Conception.” Such are the Master’s words, and by them he teaches us this: that the Divine Life is essentially single and continuous with Itself, starting from no beginning, circumscribed by no end; and that the intuitions which we possess regarding this Life it is possible to make clear by words. That is, we express the never having come from any cause by the term unbeginning or ungenerate; and we express the not being circumscribed by any limit, and not being destroyed by any death, by the term imperishable, or unending; and this absence of cause, he defines, makes it right for us to speak of the Divine life as existing ungenerately; and this being without end we are to denote as imperishable, since anything that has ceased to exist is necessarily in a state of annihilation, and when we hear of anything annihilated, we at once think of the destruction of its substance. He says then, that One Who never ceases to exist, and is a stranger to all destruction and dissolution, is to be called imperishable.